FLUID PARADIGM SHIFT 2018½

hi all. what if research into the interpretation of QM leads to a QM + GR path/ direction for unification? that is exactly the ambitious, overarching, but not inconceivable promise of the fluid paradigm of physics.

its been ~¾ a year since a last bold/ ambitious blog on copenhagen interpretation and new fluid ideas in quantum mechanics and physics.

at this point have blogged about ½ decade on some of these subjs and my neurons are really buzzing, crackling and snapping lately at full volume, the field is going thru an identifiable paradigm shift predicted years ago in this blog.

have collected a copious collection of new info/ leads, my links really runneth over. it really looks like nearly critical mass in some ways.

have been waiting to blog on this a few months and looking for an opportune moment. am expecting some massive signs to show up. many have already shown up. am finally deciding to write all this up at the near ½ year point.

one of the biggest signposts/ BREAKTHRUS is the new Becker book, What is Real, the Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics.[a] havent bought it yet but its on the top of my to-read pile. this is causing big, maybe even massive waves in the mass/ popular media eg NYT but also the scientific journals such as Nature. its being reviewed by top experts positively. major response on social media such as reddit also. maybe a gamechanger.

have been participating very highly in stackexchange physics chat. as usual its a love + hate double edged sword, its significantly cost me some in terms of “flags + kicks + goodwill” some involving rather extreme “moderator” actions. its been a very volatile chat room lately and the mods are circling the wagons. they have recently suspended 2 top chat users for 1 year, Duffield + 0celo7.[i] (during his brief return Duffield also discussed the miscarriage of his reddit shadow banning.) as my quote sections says, the pioneers are the ones with al the arrows in their backs. another very longtime regular Balarka Sen has rejected the “moderation” climate as too harsh and has announced his resignation from participation in the room in protest.

theres some new faces in the room and predominately semiclassical has been very communicative and helpful, and somewhat aligned in ideological/ philosophical directions/ objectives, with strong affinity/ appreciation/ inclination/ attraction for bohmian mechanics, understanding of kuhnian philosophy etc., have had many very lively/ fruitful discussions over wideranging topics that have really directed/ freshened/ fueled/ energized/ inspired my thinking and even excitement, a huge highlight for me over the last ¾ year! (keeping me clear on the copernican revolution as a paradigm shift wrt epicycles theory, excellent/ premiere case study!)

semiclassical is at UMN, university of minnesota, an apparently world class physics dept, apparently on the leading/ cutting edge of new research directions.[b] dont know who is the chairman or dept head or what, but their research directions are uncannily aligned with my own, and they have invited speakers that have profiled heavily in this blog, namely Bush. they are not afraid to invite brilliant popsci writers like Gilder, Age of Entanglement, and Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics. even Rigetti of QM computing semi fame. semiclassical has personally attended quite a few of these talks and reported 1sthand reactions on the chat line and interacted with the speakers eg personally asking Bush questions!

next/ then semiclassical tipped me off to the brilliant physics-philosopher-historian Bokulich and some of her research, yet another UMN speaker. Bokulich has looked into deep history mostly lost in the sands of time such as the influence of fluid dynamics analogies on Maxwell. physics has mostly airbrushed away these old ideas. Duffield is a careful/ painstaking/ meticulous researcher into the “sands of time” aka intricacies of old physics literature and has quoted some of this himself such as “vorticity/ vortex model/ vortex sea” which doesnt appear a single time Maxwells current wikipedia biolography but shows up briefly on the article/ history on displacement current.[i5] remarkably to me, Maxwell had some very old ideas that relate to cellular automata theory of physics EM field/ space propagation

I conceived the rotating matter to be the substance of certain cells, divided from each other by cell-walls composed of particles which are very small compared with the cells, and that it is by the motions of these particles, and their tangential action on the substance in the cells, that the rotation is communicated from one cell to another.

these ideas are pursued in a more modern context in [h]. but basically to propose that EM waves (along with gravity waves) are “space fluid waves” is quite radical under current physics ideology. hence duffields multiple 1year physics suspensions… maybe now its clearer how am walking a fine line myself…

Bokulich is openly proposing physicists should seriously study the crosscutting hydrodynamics analogy wrt particles and spacetime. a brilliant, visionary thinker, not afraid to take a calculated/ scientific risk and walk out a bit on a professional limb! she has all kinds of understanding of contrarian thinking/ physics, and suspect has some excellent background in kuhnian theory.

another huge new acquaintance highlight for me last ¾ year is the extraordinary Jarek Duda[c], with a CS + physics PHD and Msc math. hes one of the rare stackexchange users who has responded to an invitation to my own chat room and continued to appear occasionally. he uses the physics site to ask cutting edge physics questions and has some knack for not getting them closed/ downvoted, a rare skill that still eludes me even after ½ decade heavy participation on/ even deep sociological verging-on anthropological study of the site. jarek is a full fledged fluid paradigm advocate, attendant of the Emerging QM conference(s), producer of excellent slides on subj, and have never had the pleasure to chat with anyone directly on all this. really thrilling!

duda is investigating Zitterbewegung, old electron jitter ideas that go back to de Broglie, which is not a major area for current physics research, but does seem like it could be a wedge/ lever into new physics theory thats not explainable by standard QM theory.

so now the idea of soliton-particles while radical in some ways is being openly discussed in the Emergent QM literature/ conference by top experts.[e][e5] they are quite scattered however, and nobody is yet leading the charge. theres a lot of compartmentalization verging on disconnection wrt these ideas if you ask me.

QM field has been extremely lively with new cutting edge theory and experiments[f][f2] somewhat centered around weak measurement and other boundary-pushing areas such as mass/ large scale entanglement. the two-state vector formalism shows up as a possible new way of formulating QM that could lead to some super-QM understandings and maybe even predictions.

as pointed out in this blog before, it appears to me the QM concept of “probability density” the form of “probability fluid” may be a key way to understand the new paradigm. physicists only take this as an analogy, but it seems to play directly into the question of the “reality of the wavefn” which is apparently subject to increasing experimental study/ proof see eg very thorough recent survey by Shao 2017[f3.2]. another important key concept is borns law and how similar it is to other areas of physics such as energy density. can borns law somehow be derived in some new theory and not given merely as an axiom of QM?

from Understanding Quantum Physics, Morrison [f.32]

It is though there s a current of “probability fluid” that flows thru space. at any fixed time, the density of this fluid is largest where the particle is most likely to be found. this analogy is the basis of an extremely useful concept— the probability current density— which affords us new insights into quantum motion. (p214)

WARNING thou must not take probability fluid too seriously. probability fluid does not exist in real space; “probability flow” is colorful language designed to create in your mind a picture, an analog of the evolution of a quantum system.
(p216)

(“dont take it too seriously”? sounds again like here there be dragons™!)

there is some continued analysis of the Bohr-Einstein-Bohm-Bell ideas.[f3] a recent very high profile experiment was the Mitchell 100K bell gamer experiment.[f4] holy cow they sure got a lot of intense verging-on breathless popsci coverage for that one.

another key rosetta stone for this research is madelung fluid.[g] didnt really run across this until recently. it ties in fluid dynamics and navier-stokes eqns with the schroedinger eqn. a striking ref is [g6] by de Cordoba which proposes to derive plancks constant from fluid dynamics pov and think that experts really need to look at it more closely. (why? asked eg ACM in chat…) hint: if theory A can derive a constant for theory B, theory A is more fundamental… when was the last time someone figured out how to derive plancks constant? its eyepopping at least for me, sounds like verging on nobel-quality stuff to me!

As a physical model for the fluid itself we propose the quantum probability fluid. It turns out that the (state-dependent) viscosity of this fluid is proportional to Planck’s constant, while the volume density of entropy is proportional to Boltzmann’s constant.

now lately have been looking a little more into GR/ gravity and its interrelationship the fluid theory. it meshes quite nicely esp wrt black hole theory.[k2] there are remarkable new GR experiments. an old idea of wheelers called geometrodynamics is really not a whole lot different than the fluid/ soliton paradigm.

semiclassical pointed me to DeWitt who worked with Wheeler and DeWitt did many early fluid dynamics computational experiments. a striking observation in the nice Rickles ref [l5] that is mostly unpublished elsewhere:

DeWitt was able to quantize the gravitational field without restricting himself to flat spacetime. The method, known as the ‘background field method’, invoked physical degrees of freedom (in this case, a stiff elastic medium, like a physical ether, and a field of clocks) to localize points, and there allow for the localization of physical quantities. The gravitational field is taken to interact with this background field.

Computationally, the approach marked a great advance. However, the background is unphysical in most realistic cases—but this highlights DeWitt’s (much like Feynman, and other physicists with war experience) focus on getting the job done, and computing numbers, over conceptual issues.

again we see here topic physicists taking the idea of an ether or space-fluid in their equations and calculations but not seriously otherwise. on some search it does not appear DeWitt wrote up these ideas in particular and think thats a huge loss bordering on shame! (maybe sort of a manifestation of the huge/ deadly cost/ pitfall/ trap of the widespread cultural attitude “shut up and calculate” limitation/ thinking bias which is a passive “sin of omission” ultimately anti-explanation and therefore anti-progress/ unification/ science!)[x]

on googling, there are a few new striking ideas on a supposed unifying “superfluid” theory of space but nobody seems to be connecting them to madelung fluid or soliton research.[l2] there is some fluid pov in gravity analysis.[l3]

finally, there is some consideration of the kuhnian shifting going on.[m] shifting is quite similar to shearing! and shearing can lead to tension/ stress/ occasional earthquakes. that is on full display in the physics chat room lately, but am hoping it decreases some myself. am trying not to push the envelope too far. humans can only take so much truth as a famous novelist once said (see my quotes).

the human biases are on full display. seriously trained phds/ scientists think they are free from bias but my observation is that theirs, maybe in much more ornate dressing, may be much more tenaciously held than laymen. have encountered a lot of strong reactionary pushback lately in the physics chatroom by cohorts who were previously more easygoing and openminded.

one of the biggest reactionaries of all, “Lumo” in a class of his own and 1+ decade long blog, with colorful, spicy, biting, even caustic commentary on some of these areas.[m2] a brilliant, popular, and copious blogger, he is a deep expert in the quantum formalism, but he rejects any super-QM ideologies with a passionate intensity bordering on vitriolic and derogatory. his harsh/ stinging/ bitter/ shrill/ ridiculing words in some of these areas are increasingly bordering on desperate, not-intellectually-defensible rants. (in physics terms, yes… unhinged.) is this is the best/ main/ foremost proponent of copenhagen interptation these days? think grandfather-of-theory Bohr would not be either amused or proud…

honestly need to go thru all these sections more carefully/ thoroughly, esp trying to summarize cutting edge experiment directions, this is already ~250 links that could be pounded into further order, but already an unusually sizeable/ bordering on massive effort for me. its bigger than a 1man job. still looking for a few volunteers.

but the bottom line is that the fluid paradigm model of QM + physics is emerging, playing out, and it is a strong, epic unifying wave washing over these days, and the announcement of a massive paradigm shift taking place is fully/ strongly supported by all this very evidence.

was reminded of a semifamous quote on QM by Feynman, the brilliant pragmatist who mostly avoided pro/ con thinking on Copenhagen interpretation (barely ever referring to it directly) etc

We choose to examine a phenomenon [Double-slit experiment] which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by “explaining” how it works. We will just tell you how it works. In telling you how it works we will have told you about the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics. —Feynman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Commemorative Issue, Vol. 3 Quantum Mechanics (1989) 1-1, “Quantum Behavior.”

it is not every day one can correct a nobel prize winning physicist, but that is the fundamental nature of science and progress. the nearly 1 decade old Couder-Bush experiments now refute the Feynman pov based on the fluid dynamics/ hydrodynamics pov. alas, most physicists apparently still havent gotten the bulletin/ newsflash! there is no major revision of textbooks going on so far.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

ok, its a herculean goal to say the least, but realize need to flesh this out a little )( more to, even with all the copious supporting material, try to preemptively escape charges of that egregious/ villainous scientific/ physics crime, mere handwaving.[x] physicists say theyve been searching for decades, nearly a century, for unification. what does it mean? they regard it as a unification of forces and math, but it looks like what is staring us in the face is that a unification of crosscutting physics areas/ ideas/ concepts is needed, which are still largely studied in a reductionistic and therefore compartmentalized way. in other words, some currently distinct academic conventions need to melt away (if anyone seriously wants to really achieve the overarching goal). unify the formalism, unify the forces. these are all currently thought to be different phenomena but from the fluid pov they are all facets of the same reality. in short

the supposed differences are currently due to human comprehensibility limitations/ bias, and many of the supposed bright lines/ distinctions separating these are really gray/ blurry/ artificial. ie some of the supposed strict boundaries are merely mental/ anthropomorphic/ historical artifacts[x] some built up over decades or even a century and need to be carefully/ painstakingly/ partially dismantled to succeed at the grand challenge.

quantum mechanics

general relativity

gravity waves

light/ EM waves

(“pilot wave”) hydrodynamics

madelung fluid

bohmian mechanics, implicate vs explicate order

Bell experiments/ nonlocality measurements

nonnewtonian fluid

space as superfluid

spacetime fabric

singularities, “cosmic censorship”

(particles as) solitons

string theory

QED/ QCD

ether

vortex model/ sea (Maxwell)

in other words, the worlds largest jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces mostly scattered.need all hands on deck! to try to unite two relevant western and eastern metaphors, this is all both the elephant in the room, and the blind men and the elephant. its a massive modern form of a cascade/ myriad of epicycles and fluid pov is the underlying elliptical theory, the so called “hidden variable”.

the other key issue is that in the last century, because of the ideological/ pedagogical rejection of the idea of an ether, and as vehemently insisted by JD meeting extreme sociological/ professional resistance, to some )( degree historically the baby got thrown out with the bathwater. but, its not too late to save it.

sounds radical? all these ideas are clearly, undeniably connected, and actually very old having been hypothesized for over a century even by some 19th century physicists (thx JD!): eg Maxwell, 1861![i8] + Clifford, 1876[i7]

sounds impossible? without spelling out every word/ detail, this is the view scattered throughout all the following references. admittedly almost nobody (“else”) is proposing the overall vision right now, but again there are flickers and glimmers. in a striking case of burying the lede (but this author is not the only one guilty of this), this great ref was eyepopping for me at the end (thx much JD again for turning this up/ pointing it out!).[f.16] (p57)

Given the similarity between classical and quantum equations, it is interesting to ponder what the universe would be like if the vacuum were an elastic solid. Elementary particles would have to be standing or particle-like waves, subject to the wave uncertainty principle. Special relativity would be a consequence of the Lorentz invariance of the wave solutions, and not a property of the space-time in which the waves propagate. [31] The spatial reflection of any solution would also be a solution, so every particle would have an anti-particle that behaves like its mirror image. [32] Measurements would have to change the standing wave configuration from one stable state to another, implying quantization of measurement. Tension induced by twisting of the elastic medium would increase density and decrease wave speed, similar to the way the presence of matter decreases wave speed in general relativity. Hence gravity could be described by an index of refraction. [33–35] In short, an elastic solid universe would be similar in many ways to the one we live in. And although some properties of matter may be impossible to explain using such a classical model, spin angular momentum is not one of them.

so author Close here (2015) explains how much of electron spin dynamics can be explained classically, but doesnt stop there. hes willing to go beyond the specialization/ compartmentalization and look at the Big Picture™, to use some grand induction along with all the deduction like yin + yang.

re “although some properties of matter may be impossible to explain…” which ones in particular? alas this smells like small )( anthropomorphic compartmentalization/ reductionistic bias to me. as already outlined in this blog several times, the one typically cited by physicists, Bells thm, despite all the media/ fanfare about airtight theory/ experiments,[f4] is actually quite suspect in some very subtle/ tricky details![f3.5][f2.18-22] (Christians work again a JD tip)

physicists in their sometimes schizophrenic moods both simultaneously play up/ play down Bells thm (when rejecting new/ alternative theories, and when giving Bell himself innovation credit, respectively, etc… on that see also my own recent toy problem inquiry [x] which needs votes/ attn). oh and on that note is anyoneever gonna take La Cour/ Ott 2014 seriously?[f2.6] (this blog did in early 2016, even earlier!)[x]or do they just not have as good/ world class PR dept as Mitchell?

exactly as Bokulich indicates/ emphasizes/ pinpoints this work will inherently require a lot of analogies, metaphors, and bridges, a style of thinking that many day-to-day routine physicists are not exactly comfortable with, to say the least! (they might ridicule it and do at times directly in the hbar chat room, but zen beginners mind is closest to what will be necessary to succeed!) re analogies/ metaphors/ bridges, compare with Tenev + Horstemeyer 2016 here (which has now been thoroughly trashed in the physics chat room multiple times on my advocacy by a motley tag team of self-styled debunkers after heavy effort to get anyone to seriously read it there! reminds me of the natives + unseen ships phenomenon…[x]) but once found, these can be pushed to the limits. along with T + H a key metaphor/ analogy/ bridge will be the stress energy tensor unifying/ unified with a physical medium stress-energy tensor which my feeling/ view naturally has very strong implications for the solution/ resolution of the very deep questions such as physics singularities[e10] and the cosmic censorship hypothesis.

above the “whole thing” is sketched out by the author (Close, et al) tentatively, speculatively, as a interesting thought experiment/ gedanken.

the idea is a reality. the fluid idea is the reality.

what, wait, let me guess, its all “sketchy”? yes @#%& ofc its sketchy, it must necessarily be incomplete, because (among other reasons) einstein literally went to his grave after decades of meandering attempts to solve this stuff! and some of todays top physicists really are clueless on a grand unification theory/ theory of everything also, but ofc would never say such an unspeakable truth out loud! but just remember, its far less sketchy and incomplete as the detractors/ naysayers claim, who will dismiss it out of hand, wrt this, most of whom have a confirmation bias (etc) rivalling the uneducated masses, and wont be bothered to even seriously follow up on any of it. oh, btw, and speaking of brand new books like Becker, have you heard of Hossenfelders? lmgtfy! Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (yet another top physicist recently dissed in the hbar chat room by anonymous anklebiters, lol!) which immediately reminds me of the objections posted in chat to Tenev + Horstemeyer by another highly educated illustrious aspiring physics phd[x]

Following your analogy, it’s more like humanity is massively dumping swords and battlecruisers and atomic bomb in the fire and at an industrial scale and you just came up with a kitchen wooden spoon…

to actually unify all this will probably take hundreds of papers and decades of work. it will requiring building many bridges between current islands so to speak. yet looking at all this material, collectively/ synthesizing it, aka connecting the dots, and am somewhat hopeful at least the early parts of the revolution fully plays out in my remaining lifetime, the traces/ outlines are now appearing. but ofc (as the naysayers will downplay or be oblivious to) Rome Wasnt Built In a Day™

there was already one brief invocation of zen, so how about in closing, a striking mystical quote that professional physicists would utterly cringe at and has been mostly swept under the rug, from the grandfather Bohr himself? hows this for another/ different copenhagen interpretation? 😛

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory, [we must turn] to those kinds of problems with which thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. –Bohr